Counter-Enlightenment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Francisco de Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799): the artist's exhausted and feverish doze

"Counter-Enlightenment" is a term increasingly widely used in the second half of the twentieth century to refer to a movement that arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries in opposition to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, sometimes degenerating into "a kind of shorthand for any opposition to the dominance of Enlightenment thought."^[1] The term is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who is often (mistakenly) credited with coining it. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used the term Gegenaufklärung at the end of the nineteenth century, although only in passing. It has not been widely used since. Isaiah Berlin published widely about the Enlightenment's enemies and did much to popularise the concept of a Counter-Enlightenment movement that he associated most closely with German Romanticism. However, recent scholarship has challenged this view for focusing too narrowly on Germany and stopping abruptly in the early nineteenth century, thereby ignoring the Enlightenment's many subsequent critics, particularly in the twentieth century. Some scholars reject the use of the term 'the Counter-Enlightenment' entirely, on the grounds that there was no single Enlightenment for its alleged enemies to oppose.

1 The Counter-Enlightenment Movement vs Counter-Enlightenments
2 Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution
3 The Romantic Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century
4 Enlightened Totalitarianism
5 The Enlightenment Perversion of Reason
6 See also
7 Notes
8 External links
9 References

[edit] The Counter-Enlightenment Movement vs Counter-Enlightenments

Sir Isaiah Berlin

Although the term 'the Counter-Enlightenment' was first used in English (in passing) by William Barrett in a 1949 article in Partisan Review ("Art, Aristocracy and Reason"), it was Isaiah Berlin who established its place in the history of ideas, to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and empiricism commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's widely read essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, then reprinted in a popular collection of his essays (Against the Current) in 1981. The term has only had wide currency since then. It is only in that sense that Berlin can be said to have 'invented' it; rather, he may be seen as having popularised it.

Berlin argues that, while there were enemies of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not really 'take off' until the Germans 'rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment'. This reaction was led by the Konigsberg philosopher J. G. Hamann, 'the most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment', according to Berlin. This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the Francophile Frederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France, and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the epochal shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism. According to Berlin, the surprising and unintended consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment has been pluralism, which owes more to the Enlightenment's enemies than it does to its proponents, most of whom were monists whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have often been terror and totalitarianism. Richard Wolin (The Seduction of Unreason 2004) has traced the modern descendants of the Counter-Enlightenment in postmodernism’s deep suspicion of “universalism,” paralleled by its endorsement of “identity politics,” and concludes that it has worked against the values of toleration and mutual recognition, not merely of diversity but of commonality.

In his book "Enemies of the Enlightenment" (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment both back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street', thereby marking a major advance on Berlin's intellectual and Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early enemies of the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten 'Grub Street' literature in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries aimed at the philosophes. He delves into the obscure and at times unseemly world of the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the encyclopedistes and fought an often dirty battle to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. A great many of these early opponents of the Enlightenment attacked it for undermining religion and (thereby, in their minds) social and political order. This later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.

Graeme Garrard, in "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003), makes the case for seeing Rousseau as the father of Counter-Enlightenment thought, the man who fired the first major shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its enemies. This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as a philosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. Also, like McMahon, it traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German 'Sturm und Drang' movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book "Counter-Enlightenments" (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single 'movement' called 'The Counter-Enlightenment' (a term not used in English until well into the twenieth century). Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightements, from the middle of the eighteenth century through to its opponents among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has enemies on all points of the ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightement's enemies depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.

This argument has been taken a step further by intellectual historian James Schmidt, who questions the idea of 'the Enlightenment' and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As our conception of 'the Enlightement' has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so too has the idea of 'the Counter-Enlightement'. Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter century have challenged the stereotypical view of the eighteenth century as an 'Age of Reason', leading Schmidt to speculate on whether 'the Enlightenment' might not actually be a creation of its enemies, rather than the other way round. The fact that the term 'the Enlightenment' was first used in English to refer to a historical period in 1894 (see Schmidt 2003) lends some support to this argument that it was a later construction projected back on to the eighteenth century.

[edit] Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution

Although serious doubts were raised about the Enlightenment prior to the 1790s (e.g. in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France and J. G. Hamann in Germany in particular), the violent extremes of the French Revolution (particularly during the Reign of Terror) fuelled a major reaction against the Enlightenment, which many writers blamed for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the ancien regime, thereby fomenting revolution. Counter-Revolutionary conservatives like Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel all asserted a close link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, as did many of the revolutionary leaders themselves, so that the Enlightenment became increasingly discredited as the Revolution became increasingly bloody. That is why the French Revolution and its aftermath was also a major phase in the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought. For example, while Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790) contains no systematic account of the connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, it is heavily spiced with hostile references to the French Revolutionaries as merely politicised philosophes. Barruel argues in his best-selling "Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism" (1797)--one of the most widely read books of its period--that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons. In "Considerations on France" (1797), Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment.

[edit] The Romantic Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century

Many, but by no means all, early Romantic writers like Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' (Georg Philipp 'Friedrich Frieherr von Hardenberg') and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited this Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the philosophes (in France) and Aufklarer (in Germany) for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. Of particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment, even though very few of the philosophes and Aufklarer were actually atheists. (Most were deists.) This view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative, Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Coleridge are exceptions; few Romantic writers had much to say for or against the Enlightenment. For the most part, they ignored it. The philosopher Jacques Barzun argues that Romanticism was not anti-rational, but balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice, and that Romanticism had its roots in the Enlightenment. Marshall Brown makes much the same argument in 'Romanticism and Enlightenment', questioning the stark opposition between these two periods. In Goya's "Sleep of Reason" (illustration, above right) one of the nightmarish owls offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk: even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content, under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx [1].

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and Romanticism had more or less run its course. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable (and highly influential) exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment during his 'middle period' (late-1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned violently against it and subscribed to the earlier view of conservative Counter-Revolutionaries like Burke and Maister who blamed the French Revolution (which Nietzsche always hated) on the Enlightenment.

[edit] Enlightened Totalitarianism

It was not until after WWII that 'the Enlightenment' re-emerged as a key organising concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas. Shadowing it has been a resurgent Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the eighteenth century faith in reason for twentieth century totalitarianism. The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947), which traces the degeneration of enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomised by the cunning 'bourgeois' hero Odysseus) to twentieth century fascism. (Tellingly, they say nothing about communism, which is, for many liberal critics of the Enlightenment like Berlin and Jacob Talmon, directly descended from the rationalism of the philosophes). Many postmodern writers and some feminists have made similar arguments, depicting the Enlightenment conception of reason as imperialistic and totalitarian. Michel Foucault, for example, argued that attitudes towards the insane during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that supposedly enlightened notions of humane treatment were not universally adhered to, but instead, that the Age of Reason had to construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing stand. Berlin himself, although no postmodernist, argues that the Enlightenment's legacy in the twentieth century has been monism (which he claims favours political authoritarianism), whereas the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment has been pluralism (something he associates with liberalism). These are two of the 'strange reversals' of modern intellectual history.

[edit] The Enlightenment Perversion of Reason

What seems to unite all of the Enlightenment's disparate enemies (from eighteenth century religious opponents, counter-revolutionaries and Romantics to twentieth century conservatives, feminists, critical theorists and environmentalists) is a rejection of what they consider to be the Enlightenment perversion of reason: the distorted conceptions of reason of the kind each associates with the Enlightenment in favour of a more restricted view of the nature, scope and limits of human rationality. However, none of the enemies of the Enlightenment has abandoned reason entirely. The battle has been over the scope, meaning and application of reason, not over whether it is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, essential or inessential per se. The conflict between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment is not a conflict between friends and enemies of reason, any more than it is between friends and enemies of enlightenment (small 'e', no definite article). Although objections have consistently been raised against what has been taken as the 'typical' Enlightenment view of reason by its opponents (on all points of the ideological spectrum--left, right and centre), this has almost never been generalised to reason as such by Counter-Enlightenment thinkers.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

^ Gary Grieve-Carlson , reviewing Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (on-line text)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

Berlin, Isaiah, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ISBN 0-374-52717-2.
Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Henry Hardy, editor, Princeton University Press, 2003
Garrard, Graeme, Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (2003) ISBN 0-7914-5604-8
Garrard, Graeme, Counter-Enlightements: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2006) ISBN 0-415-18725-7
Mali, Joseph and Robert Wokler, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2003, ISBN 0-87169-935-4
McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity details the reaction to Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history from 1750 to 1830.
Schmidt, James, What Enlightenment Project?, Political Theory, 28/6 (2000), pp. 734 - 57.
Schmidt, James, Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians and the Oxford English Dictionary, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64/3 (2003), pp. 421 - 43.
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press) 2004, sets out to trace “the uncanny affinities between the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism.”